Cold Solution

        The blizzard raged around him, wet snow clinging to his hair, his clothes, his eyelashes. He blinked it away, sending hot tears coursing down his cheeks. His tough, rugged boots bit deep into the snow; the satisfying crunch he had enjoyed as a child now but a minor annoyance in the back of his mind.
         Then he saw her.
         His heart pounded. Blood throbbed in his ears. His face flushed as a wave of emotions washed over him. Now the snow flakes were bitter against his skin – tiny pinpricks of ice against the boiling inferno of his skin. Clenched fists tightened once more, painfully, white knuckles matching the pure carpet of snow underfoot.
         The blizzard swirled and calmed as he trudged through natures attempt to quench the fire burning within him. His path carved deep into the blanket of whiteness, uneven yet certain.
        She was but an arms length from him, her back turned. Her hair was seemingly untouched by the snow, cascading like a golden waterfall down her back. She stood the way he knew she always had, straight, tall – proud. He opened his mouth to call out to her, but in the wind it would not carry even that small distance. Words would not be needed.
         As he came upon her his eyes watched helplessly as his hands moved as if possessed. But possessed, not by some unholy demons, but his heart. He grasped her by the shoulder and roughly spun her to face him. In a spray of snow and hair she turned. Suddenly her emerald eyes beset his icy blue.
         The deepest green eyes looked straight into his. They sparkled in a way he had never seen before, looking both at him and through him, through him to a deeper place. In that first heartbeat of contact his soul had been laid bare before her. And hers to him.
         His eyes flashed at what he saw.
         Love.
         His love. For her.
         Rejected.
         His free hand channelled the rage. The sword didn’t ring out as he drew it from the scabbard, hidden by the whistling blast of the blizzard.
Her eyes betrayed her. Pain, confusion, questioning looks of disbelief. He was cold to them all. She slid backwards off the blade, sending smatterings of crimson blood flawing the flawless snow. The widening red stain on her middle was matched by her widening mouth. She said something with difficulty, lost on the wind. He turned away, threw down his sword which stabbed into the frozen earth, wobbling only slightly, like an erect totem to the retribution dealt.
         As the body of the woman he once loved shook with shivers of cold and pain, he slowly began retracing his steps. The blood stained sword, quickly frostbitten, left far behind him. The hot blood on it, meandering down the cold steel, left far behind.
         For a moment he stopped and looked at his hands, thought on what they had done. A single tear fell onto the leather gloves. As the blizzard picked up, he pulled his hood up and put his hands in his pockets. Soon he was lost.